At 12:01 PM 4/3/2006, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
Xen's bigges strength really is in the colocation business. With VX-enabled machines, it is capable of running instrumented OS's (Linux, Free/NetBSD) at almost native speeds, and non-instrumented OS's (Windows, Solaris) with a couple-% hit. It's that flexibility that leads to colo as the market where Xen shines.
People seem to be thinking that Xen is only for sharing a colo machine with somebody else. But it could just as well be used for one organization to isolate each major application to a single virtual server, i.e. email server, general web server, wiki server, hot web app server, Asterisk server, etc. This way, when one of the applications justifies its own server, migration is somewhat simpler because it is not entangled with other applications.
Now that is what I have in mind. For me this is esp important where I have something nasty like a guy hosting a bunch of forums that are always not getting updated and getting defaced or worse. Until now I have had a dirty machine for stuff I know could lead to problems like that. But that brings up another question, how far isolated are different instances from each other really?
-- Michael Dillon